PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Diane Arbus, a Hunter Wielding a Lens

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: January 9, 2004

IN the photograph, the 11-year-old girl stands stiffly before a plain wall in her sleeveless, white crocheted dress, arms leaden, mouth shut. Her grave face is tightly framed by long hair and bangs, which almost conceal her eyes. She stares back at us from the shadow cast by the bangs, with a look that I might register as fear, although who is to say for sure? The heavy formality of the transaction between photographer and subject announces itself. The girl is clearly responding to the person making this portrait, whose presence we sense. By its nature the picture tells us who this photographer is. She makes sure that we know.

Diane Arbus once compared movies to photographs. ''When you go to the movies and you see two people in bed,'' she said, ''you're willing to put aside the fact that you perfectly well know that there was a director and a cameraman and assorted lighting people all in that same room, and the two people in bed weren't really alone. But when you look at a photograph, you can never put that aside.''

Two traveling Arbus shows have occasioned a fresh blizzard of tributes and invective. A full-dress survey, sanctioned by the Arbus estate, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first major retrospective since the landmark posthumous one in 1972, will get to the Metropolitan Museum next year, when I'll make my way toward a fuller verdict on Arbus's whole career.

Meanwhile, another show, the appetizer to that event, you might say, opens on Monday at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. It has been organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

The exemplary polarizing artist, Arbus, who was 48 when she committed suicide in 1971, was either a compassionate renegade who dignified and threw herself into the lives of the marginal subjects to whom she gravitated, or she was an exploitative narcissist of morbid eloquence for whom, as Susan Sontag acidly wrote 30 years ago, America was ''just a freak show, a wasteland.'' Ms. Sontag memorably elaborated: ''The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista), everybody is shown to look the same.''

This is not quite true, by the way -- some family members look more freakish than others in Arbus's photographs. But toward the end of her life, Arbus did say in passing that she imagined a kind of family album of her work. From this remark, the show arriving at the Grey, ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums,'' has devised its slender thesis.

The core of the exhibition is a cache of more than 200 previously unseen photographs, both contact sheets and finished prints, which Arbus made for a private commission at the end of December 1969. She was hired by a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay (a Mount Holyoke alumna), to shoot a family Christmas gathering at their Upper East Side town house. Their elder daughter, Marcella, was the 11-year-old. There were also a toddler son, Konrad Jr., and a younger daughter, Leslie, who, as the exhibition was being put together, decided she did not want any of the photographs of herself published; so at the last minute they were excised from the show's catalog.

Arbus started out as a commercial photographer working with her husband, then became an artist on her own. To support yourself as an art photographer during the 1960's, even if you were Arbus and your work had been shown in the Museum of Modern Art, was not easy. Divorced, Arbus continued to take commercial jobs to augment her income. The Matthaeis, being fashionable people who collected art, hired Arbus, a fashionable artist. She spent two days photographing them -- unobtrusively, according to their accounts, while they went about their business -- occasionally posing them on a sofa below their Monet, or shooting them singly, as with the photograph of Marcella and another one of Konrad Jr., a generic cutie on his rocking horse.

Because of the tight grip the Arbus estate has kept on the use of her photographs and private material, these family pictures have been received gladly by information-starved Arbus scholars, notwithstanding that this was clearly a minor gig for her. They provide some kind of window onto Arbus's working method while on commission, but with the exception of Marcella's portrait and one or two other pictures -- not a bad percentage, considering -- the photographs are uniformly routine and banal.

Beefing up the show to satisfy the publishers of the catalog, the organizers have thrown in whatever else they could that seemed relevant. This means more commissions: the Spencer Museum owns prints of photographs Arbus shot for Esquire magazine, along with some of their contact sheets; as with the Matthaei contact sheets, these suggest how Arbus operated on assignment and reveal which pictures she or her editors liked best.